No-Gi Pans 2026: 7 Storylines After ADCC

Three weeks ago, Pawel Jaworski was pulling guard his way through the ADCC World Championship in Poland, becoming the first Polish athlete to win an ADCC title. On October 2, he walks onto a different mat in New Jersey wearing an Academia Gorila rashguard instead of ADCC’s official kit, chasing a second major title in a month most grapplers would need a full season to collect.

An athlete walks out at the 2026 ADCC World Championships in Kraków — the first leg of this year’s no-gi Grand Slam, which continues at the Pan Championship in Secaucus.

The Second Leg of 2026’s No-Gi Grand Slam

Call it a scheduling accident or call it smart event planning, but the IBJJF’s calendar put the No-Gi Pan Championship just three weeks behind ADCC’s Kraków World Championship, and a chunk of the ADCC roster didn’t bother taking the month off. The FloGrappling preview explicitly frames this as the “second No-Gi Grand Slam of the season” — shorthand for a stretch where the same names keep showing up on different brackets under different rulesets, and the ones who show up tired lose to the ones who don’t.

More than 2,300 athletes are registered across 154 divisions from youth through master brackets, which is the kind of number that makes “No-Gi Pans” sound like a single event when it’s really three days of parallel tournaments happening under one roof. The black belt adult brackets are the ones worth clearing your schedule for, and the final brackets went up October 1 — the day before competition starts. It’s a similar density problem to the one we broke down in our UFC BJJ 11 storylines preview — too many meaningful matches on one card for any single angle to cover.

The No-Gi Pan Championship doesn’t carry ADCC’s cash prizes or its single-elimination superfight drama, and it never will — that’s not the format. What it carries instead is volume and depth: double-elimination brackets inside a federation ranking system that follows competitors across their entire careers, not just one tournament every two years. A Pan title doesn’t pay like an ADCC medal, but it counts toward something ADCC doesn’t track at all, which is exactly why a roster this stacked still shows up for it three weeks after the bigger paycheck event.

Jaworski Brings ADCC Momentum Into a Loaded Medium Heavyweight Bracket

Jaworski’s ADCC run wasn’t a fluke run through a weak bracket. He beat ranked competition at -88kg in Poland using a leg lock game he’s been sharpening since Academia Gorila in Warsaw turned him into one of Europe’s best black belts in under two years under coaches Marcin Polczyk and Jędrzej Loska. Winning ADCC gold and then showing up three weeks later for a different federation’s marquee no-gi event is the kind of move that either ends in a statement win or an exhausted upset loss — there isn’t much middle ground when you’re defending momentum instead of chasing it.

He’s not getting a free pass to the podium. Jacob Couch — the “Hillbilly Hammer” out of Pedigo Submission Fighting in Kentucky, who ran a perfect seven-submission night at the ADCC East Coast Trials in 2023 — is entered in the same medium heavyweight bracket, along with Wallisson Oliveira Souza and Alan Sanchez. Couch grew up in Hazard, Kentucky and was raised by his grandmother before jiu-jitsu gave him a different path; his black belt came through grinding regional trials and a featured run on the Daisy Fresh documentary series, not a federation development pipeline. His leg lock game is sharp enough that this bracket could easily produce the tournament’s best match on paper, not just its biggest name.

Oliveira Souza isn’t a stranger in this bracket either — he’s the reigning 2024 No-Gi Worlds medium heavyweight champion, and the two have already met on this exact stage. Jaworski beat him in the semifinal at the 2025 Pan No-Gi, which means this bracket has a real rematch buried in it if the draw cooperates, not just a collection of résumés that haven’t crossed paths yet.

Two Different Answers to the Middleweight Question

Tarik Hopstock and Kieran Kichuk solve middleweight no-gi matches in almost opposite ways, which is exactly what makes this bracket worth watching instead of just picking a favorite and moving on. Hopstock, the Norwegian black belt under Eduardo “Teta” Rios who won 2025 No-Gi Worlds gold, built his reputation on the Tarikoplata — a shoulder lock tight enough to carry his own name in the instructional market after a collaboration with Lachlan Giles. He wins by making opponents choose between a bad position and a worse one, grinding toward the same entry match after match until someone makes a mistake trying to avoid it.

Kichuk takes the opposite route. The Canadian black belt under Fernando “Gringo” Zulick, representing Team Lloyd Irvin, built his name on raw submission-hunting aggression rather than a single signature move, and his win at the Emerald City Invitational 8-man tournament came from forcing pace, not waiting for a mistake. Elijah “Big Breakfast” Dorsey, also out of the Lloyd Irvin camp and already an IBJJF World, Pan, and ADCC medalist, adds a third style to a bracket that could be decided by whoever controls tempo first. Saul Viayra and CJ Murdock round out a middleweight field deep enough that the eventual winner will have earned it through four or five matches, not a soft draw.

A Legendary Name Returns to the Super Heavyweight Bracket

Andre Galvao’s name on a 2026 IBJJF bracket is news by itself. The ATOS founder is an IBJJF Hall-of-Famer with five World titles and nine Pan titles to his name, and his last stretch of high-level competition ran through ADCC superfights — including the 2022 loss to Gordon Ryan that closed out that chapter — rather than IBJJF brackets. Official IBJJF listings have him entered at super-heavyweight; third-party tournament trackers describe a separate Master 3 heavyweight bracket, which isn’t unusual this close to a major event, since final confirmation depends on payment and the brackets IBJJF actually published October 1. Either way, a competitor with his resume stepping back onto an IBJJF mat changes how hard everyone else in the division has to compete.

That includes Natã Tenca, his own training partner at Atos, who enters off a No-Gi Open Weight World title at purple belt before moving up in both rank and competition level. Sharing a gym with a nine-time Pan champion is one thing in the practice room and a different thing entirely when the brackets put you on the same side of the draw at the same event.

Sarah Galvao’s Streak Meets Anabel Lopez Beard’s Heavyweight Run

Sarah Galvão is 19 and already has a Pan No-Gi middleweight title and double gold from the Asian Championship on her resume as a black belt, after “capturing every major IBJJF title” available to her as a brown belt first. She’s entered at middleweight here, and the story with her isn’t whether she can compete with grown black belts — she’s already done that — it’s whether the level jump at a loaded Pan bracket exposes a gap that smaller fields haven’t. Nadia Franklin joins her in a division that’s thinner at the top than the men’s brackets, which raises the stakes on every individual match instead of spreading the drama across a dozen names.

Anabel Lopez Beard doesn’t have that question to answer. The Fightzone London black belt has won the IBJJF No-Gi World heavyweight title three years running since 2024, and she heads into Secaucus fresh off an ADCC medal earlier this year on the senior international stage. A fourth straight World-level no-gi title at heavyweight would put her in rare company, and Pan Championship gold is the version of that run nobody’s handed her yet — she’s collected Worlds and Europeans, but Secaucus is a line still missing from the resume.

How to Watch and What to Expect in Secaucus

FloGrappling streams all three days live, with the first mats going at 1:30 PM UTC on Friday, October 2, and competition running through Sunday. There’s no single “finals day” the way a one-mat superfight card works — with 154 divisions spread across youth, adult, and master brackets, the black belt adult finals you actually care about are scattered through the weekend rather than stacked at the end, so check FloGrappling’s schedule for your specific bracket instead of assuming Sunday is the only day that matters.

The venue itself is new to this event. The Pan No-Gi ran at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York in 2025; Secaucus and the Meadowlands Exposition Center are hosting for the first time this cycle, which is worth knowing if you’re used to the old layout and travel logistics from past years. A new venue in its first year running an event this size is also worth watching for the small stuff — mat spacing, warm-up room access, how fast brackets actually move compared to the posted schedule.

Why the Grand Slam Framing Actually Matters

A grappler who wins ADCC and then no-shows every other major for the rest of the year used to be the norm, not the exception — ADCC’s prestige was enough on its own to carry a competitor’s reputation through a quiet stretch. Jaworski, Couch, Lopez Beard, and the rest of the ADCC-to-Pans carryover roster are quietly rewriting that expectation. Treating the no-gi calendar as a season with a cumulative resume, rather than one career-defining night every two years, raises the bar for what “best in the world” has to mean. It also means fans get more meaningful matches per year instead of waiting out a long gap between marquee events, which is good for the sport even when it’s exhausting for the athletes living it.

The next stop on that calendar is IBJJF No-Gi Worlds, and whoever leaves Secaucus with momentum intact walks into that bracket as the favorite everyone else has to account for. For a division like Jaworski and Couch’s, that’s a short runway — win here, and the questions about whether ADCC gold was a one-off answer themselves. We’ll have the recap the way we covered Felipe Pena’s ADCC history-making run back in September.

Sources

• 2026 Pan IBJJF Jiu-Jitsu No-Gi Championship — official event page — dates, venue, and bracket release details.
• WHO’S IN For the 2026 IBJJF No-Gi Pan Championships — FloGrappling — confirmed competitor list by division.
• 2026 Pan IBJJF Jiu-Jitsu No-Gi Championship Guide — FloGrappling — schedule and broadcast information.
• 5 Things To Know About Polish Grappling Sensation Pawel Jaworski — ONE Championship — background on Jaworski’s career and Academia Gorila.